D.C. bureaus cut costs, coverage

For Suzanne Struglinski, it’s only getting tougher to sign up new members to the Regional Reporters Association. And the problem isn’t the $20 dues.

“The pool of people covering Washington from a regional or local angle is definitely shrinking,” said Struglinski, the association’s president and a one-person bureau for Utah’s Deseret Morning News.

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Whether through layoffs or attrition, newspapers have increasingly cut back on keeping reporters stationed in Washington, opting instead for the less costly substitute: wire copy.

And the effect, regional reporters and editors argue, is that readers outside Washington’s corridors of power lose the priceless benefit of having a correspondent within spitting distance of the city’s movers and shakers and the offices of local legislators.

The Associated Press, and other services, may cover specific areas across the nation, but something seems to get lost in the translation when newspapers from Dallas to Minneapolis reduce Washington-based correspondents.

“I don’t think it’s a loss for the paper,” said Sylvia Smith, the incoming president of the National Press Club and Washington editor of the Ft. Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette. “I think it’s a loss for the community.” While veteran Washington reporters are quick to discuss the repercussions of this downward trend — and also the glories of fat and sassy newspaper days in the pre-Internet era — quantifying such changes has proved trickier.

But looking at the Regional Reporters Association’s membership alone reveals a precipitous drop: A decade ago, there were more than 200 reporters in the organization; now, only 84 remain.

That’s a running theme in conversations with regional correspondents, who repeatedly mention that even if jobs are not eliminated outright, positions routinely go unfilled: One or two reporters take on the workload of what might have been three or four.

Smith said that when she helped launch the newspaper’s Washington beat in 1989, it coincided with the arrival of another Hoosier in the capital: former Vice President Dan Quayle.

Back then, Smith said, there were a dozen Indiana regional reporters available to regularly hold newsmaker lunches. Now there are only two.

And those dwindling numbers can have real significance in terms of the locally focused reporting and context that readers get. Smith said that a regional correspondent, with more knowledge of local politicians, is more likely to home in on legislators’ voting records and committee appearances.

With the recent hearings on steroid use in Major League Baseball, for example, Smith didn’t have to chase the national story but focused on the performance of Reps. Mark Souder and Dan Burton.

Jerry Zremski, former president of both the RRA and the National Press Club, agreed that regional reporters have a responsibility to their readers and can step outside the national press bubble.

Recently covering home-state Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on the campaign trail for The Buffalo News, Zremski mentioned how he asked Clinton about a pledge to bring 200,000 jobs to upstate New York, while the national press was focused on the larger horse race narrative of the campaign.

And there’s a possibility, reporters said, of noticing aberrations that come only with intimate knowledge of even little-known members of Congress — aberrations that can turn into major news events.

That’s what happened in 2005 when regional reporters from Copley News Service and the San Diego Union-Tribune broke the corruption scandal surrounding Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.).

“I worked on this story for several months, and I was a regional reporter,” said Jerry Kammer, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Cunningham story. “I feel very fortunate this story happened at a time when we had the resources.”

Marcus Stern, who shared the prize, first became suspicious of Cunningham’s trips to Saudi Arabia, and when initial leads didn’t pan out, he completed a “lifestyle audit” of the now-disgraced representative, who is serving an eight-year prison term.